First off: holy wow, but The Dance of the Dissident Daughter has a long title.
Second off: I know, I know, there are all kinds of reasons why it’s bizarre that I read this book. I’m not so much a woman, nor am I steeped in Christian tradition, nor do I spend very much time with non-fiction, outside of the historical. But I was asked to, and I said I’d give it a try, and here we are. So.
It turns out that once upon a time, the author of The Secret Life of Bees (which is a book about which I know essentially nothing, but I bet you’ve heard of it, too) mostly wrote in the thriving world of inspirational Christian books, a world that was alive and doing very well long before Left Behind burst onto the scene.[1] And then one day, which would far more accurately be portrayed by me as over a series of several months and years, she realized that her religion as it is practiced in her church and by most people she knew, and not incidentally in a way that also matches my experience on the topic, is really not very good for women. They are made to feel inferior by words both spoken and left out, by numerous deeds, and by unavailability of responsibility and influence. And after she realized it, she started taking steps to repair her life. And after she had repaired her life to her satisfaction, she wrote a book in the hopes that other women out there could also get a little bit of the same kind of repair.
Me, then, not so much the target audience. My responses are many and varied and far too extensive for the scope of this review, even were I inclined to try to present them all. But they are certainly colored by the fact of feeling so far outside. That is, so many of the complaints that she had about the church as a monolithic entity (which it is of course not, but in many ways it acts enough as one to move the discussion forward with and handwave that of course there are exceptions) were highly similar to experiences I’ve had, in which the self is devalued at the expense of the group and of tradition. Some of these complaints were specifically related to being a woman, of course, but many were not. And yet the book is very explicitly and throughout addressed just to women instead of to everyone. But at the same time, it’s really difficult for me to validly complain about being the excluded gender in this book when I’m the included gender in the majority of books out there, especially here noting the Bible in this category. I guess if I were the kind of person who hasn’t internalized the inherent correctness of gender equality, this could have been some kind of important wake-up call?
Anyway, that’s a sample reaction to the book. Feel free to discuss it with me in person, and I’d expect to be able to come up with others. It was, in any event, a very interesting book wherein I got to have a conversation about a lot of things that are typically well outside my experience. The author has some written tics that bothered me from time to time, as I’ve said about previous things I’ve read. In this case[3] as in those, it was rarely an important issue, just something that buzzed around my head from time to time. On the whole, feel free to read it. There could be something there for you. Certainly the moreso if you’re a Christian woman who is open to the idea that chicks are as good as dudes.[5]
[1] You know, I never did finish that series, and I regularly forget I ever read most of them. They were way worse than Narcissus in Chains, but failed to trigger the sin of unmet expectations in my head. So, oops on that?[2]
[2] My hand to, um, God, that statement was not intended as a sop. It’s just on my mind now.
[3] She would be talking about an event, and state that as the event was happening, it occurred to her that it tied in to this other previous event or to this metaphor that she’d recently been considering regarding her spiritual changes.[4] And the thing is, I’m sure that happened sometimes, but she says it so often that I eventually became unwilling to believe it really happened right then, and not far later as she was gathering her thoughts and her notes in order to tell her story. I try to be a fairly thoughtful person about my actions and motivations, but I’m not always on like she would have to have been. (And she certainly might have been anyway, it’s just so far outside my experience that it grew to bug me.)
[4] I feel so petty even complaining about this! But is it genuine pettiness, or is it gender-guilt? You decide! (I think it’s genuine pettiness, for my part.)
[5] I’ve gotten in trouble for saying this before, so I feel obligated to clarify. “as good as” can be taken as loaded language, but I don’t believe it to be so. Our societal problem is that men are perceived as being more valuable (your quantifiable or qualifiable scale of choice here) than women. Changing that perception necessarily, I would claim, requires that the value placed on women rises. The value placed on men could instead fall, but there are all kinds of psychological and sociological reasons why I feel that would be the lesser of the two choices.
Since the in person conversing isn’t likely to happen for a while…
Two questions.
(1) You talk about her amassed institutional grievances, but did these insights lead her to see more fundamental theological or structural problems with how the religion-as-conceived treats women?
(2) What did she really mean by “the sacred feminine”? I’m a bit interested in the content of what you called the repairs of her life.
That’s a fair assessment, I suppose.
1) Well, as-conceived is kind of a key component, here. She mostly sets her sights on the more female-centric religions of the far past that pre-date Judaism and its far-reaching effects on modern Western religion. There’s no addressing of the Eastern religions and their treatment of women, though, so I guess that should answer your question.
2) Repairs mostly consisted of letting herself be a source of authority in her life, rather than keeping the subservient daughter-wife role she had previously been living. (She does not imply that marriage keeps women down, only that the type of marriage she had at the time can, and that it did contribute to her passive role in her own life.) The sacred feminine mostly consists of a more nature- and now-centric view of the divine and of allowing for the fact that the being we call God does not imply a patriarchal bearded figure from on high that has no interest in any non-spiritual aspect of our lives; there might be a kindly paternal figure in there, but there’s also a tough old broad with a bawdy sense of humor that wants us to be happy about today, not just some celestial future with clouds and streets of gold. And a lot of other figures, too.
It seems like patriarchy is a term that implies stern authority that must be obeyed and not questioned, and that although it hurts women more because men are in charge of it, it hurts a lot of men as well, and women are every bit as capable of being patriarchal in their words and deeds. And the sacred feminine when stripped of its sacred aspect is essentially a more free and collaborative alternative to that patriarchy.
So, are those the answers you were looking for?
Thanks – yes, answers.
Based on this synopsis alone, it seems that this is a reactionary step for the author. Perhaps a necessary reaction, but it appears that she’s replacing one gender (or cluster of self-identifying properties) at the center of her spiritual practice with another.
For those people who have been fucked up by a background, the nurturing and healing properties of such places are probably important… but ultimately transient. It seems like paying such attention to — to the point of centralizing — any subset of the properties of our humanity, in one’s religious life, is ill-advised, for some set of reasons that she is, in fact, reacting to.
But I’m probably full of shit. Why anybody would listen to an atheist about this I don’t know. 🙂
My instinct is to qualify that it’s probably less *about* gender than you’re perceiving here. But then I think to myself that I might naturally see it that way, as a man reading a book directed at women.
So, it’s plausible that nobody should be listening to a man about this any more than they would to an atheist?
It is kind of sad that I can’t hear/read the words ‘sacred feminine’ without thinking of The Da Vinci Code.
This book sounds interesting but it would be weird to read a book about someone who started from the same bad place and ended up in a different good (at least I assume is good) place.
I’ve wondered how much is a function of age as opposed to intrinsic spirituality. That is, when you find problems in the church/religion and you’re 40, are you a lot more likely to try to find an interpretation of that church/religion that fits your enlightened view about societal gender issues than to abandon your church/religion, and are you correspondingly more likely to jettison the entire baggage cart wholesale when you’re 20?
(I’ve also been thinking about saying so for days on end, and kept failing to figure out exactly what I meant. I think this may have accomplished it, though.)